Marta Perry - Murder in Plain Sight

“Who told you that?” Trey snapped the words. He obviously hadn’t heard about this.

Geneva’s friends were turning on her. That was one of the things Trey had feared. Geneva might say she wasn’t bothered, but it had to hurt.

“It doesn’t matter in the least,” she said. “Now, is there anything else I can do, besides arranging a talk with Elizabeth?”

“Not that I can think of.” If she could keep Geneva out of things, she would, but Geneva had a mind of her own.

“Strawberry-rhubarb cobbler for dessert,” Geneva said. “I’ll bring it in now. Leo, do you want to help me? And Bobby, there’s a fresh pot of coffee on the stove.”

Leo followed her toward the kitchen, and Bobby trailed along after them. Trey stood, hand on the back of his chair. She didn’t need to look at him to know that he was still frowning.

“Maybe I should help-” she began, but Trey stopped her with a look.

“What’s going on?” His voice was a furious undertone. “Why don’t you want me to drive you to see this coworker of Cherry’s?”

Because Chip hinted that you might have been involved with her. Because Cherry’s coworker might be in a position to confirm that, and she’d hardly do it with you standing there.

No, she couldn’t say any of that. Any more than she could come right out and tell him what Chip had said while they were sitting in his house, with his mother likely to come back into the room at any moment.

“She may talk more freely to another woman. In private,” she added.

She could feel his gaze on her face, probing.

“I’ll wait in the truck.” His tone didn’t allow argument. “Are you sure that’s all?”

“What else could there be?” She stared at him, needing to see his face when she asked the question.

“Nothing,” he said, but again she had that sense of emotion moving behind the word. “Nothing.”

“HOW WELL DID YOU KNOW Cherry Wilson?” Jessica tried to keep the question from sounding accusatory. But accusing or not, it wasn’t fair to anyone to avoid the subject because she was afraid of what she might hear.

She gave a cautious glance across the front seat of the pickup at Trey as they drove toward the mobile-home park where Kristin McGowan lived. He didn’t look particularly bothered by the question.

Trey shrugged. “As well as you know anyone in a small town. I was several years ahead of her in school. She’d have been peddling Girl Scout cookies when I was playing football.”

Sidetracked, she raised her eyebrows. “Let me guess. You were the quarterback.”

“I was. But how did you know that? Has my mother been showing you her family album?”

“Bobby mentioned something about high school.” But now that she thought about it, she’d love to see the Morgan family photo album. “He seems to have a pretty big sense of obligation to you.”

“I wish he’d forget all that.” Trey’s hands moved on the steering wheel. “Maybe I kept him from being stuffed into a locker a time or two. That’s no big deal.”

“It might to the one being stuffed.” That wouldn’t have happened to Trey, she felt sure. He would always have been the Big Man on Campus. “But about Cherry-”

“What about Cherry? We’ll be at her friend’s house in a minute. She probably knows more about Cherry than I do.”

“It would help me to know what to ask if I had a better sense of what she was like,” she improvised. “As it is, she’s a body in a crime-scene photo to me.”

The lines in his face deepened, and his hands moved again on the leather-padded wheel. “That wouldn’t give you much of an impression, I guess. But I still don’t see what I can tell you.”

“You went to the inn for lunch sometimes, didn’t you?”

“Sure. Once a week, at least.”

“Just tell me the impression she’d make on a customer.”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether the customer was a man or a woman. She always flirted with the men. Maybe she thought it brought her bigger tips.”

“Did it?”

“How would I know?” Now he did sound irritated. “What’s this all about, Jessica? Why this sudden interest in what I thought of her?”

She could evade the question, but that would be the same as lying, and she didn’t want a lie between them. “It was something Chip said, about how you were one of Cherry’s favorite customers. About how well you always tipped her.”

The look he gave her set a distance between them. “I didn’t hit on her, if that’s what you mean.” He dropped the words like ice cubes. “If I tipped her better than most-well, I do that, for the most part. I try not to forget that I have it easy compared with a lot of people.”

His lips clamped shut on the words, and he turned into the mobile-home park. He leaned forward, not speaking, obviously checking the numbers for the one she wanted.

She’d succeeded in making him angry with her, and to no good end, as far as she could see. The car stopped, and Trey gestured to a mobile home on the right.

“That’s it. I’ll wait here.”

“Thank you.” She slid out quickly, glad to get away from the frigid atmosphere. “I don’t know how long I’ll be.”

He shrugged, picking up the newspaper that he’d stuffed into the door pocket. “No hurry.”

Kristin McGowan was a very different type from Milly Cotter, the college student who waited tables to help pay the bills. Kristin stood back to let her enter the crowded living room of the trailer, pausing to switch off the television, and led her to a seat on the cracked-vinyl sofa.

“Sorry about the mess.” She waved a vague hand at the clutter of toys, magazines and newspapers that seemed to cover every inch of the floor. She yawned broadly. “My mom’s watching the kids so I can get a little sleep. I hafta be at work at four, so maybe we can make this short. Don’t see what I can tell you, anyway.”

Nobody ever did. “I’m interested in Cherry, and I understand you were one of her closest friends. Tell me about her.”

Kristin shrugged. “Close-well, yeah, I guess. Cherry wasn’t the type to make friends with women, y’know? But we knew each other since middle school, and there we were working at the same place.”

“So you’d talk. It’s only natural you would, when things got quiet at the restaurant.”

“Mostly Cherry talked. She wasn’t interested in hearing anything about my kids, that’s for sure.” She ran her hand back through shaggy blond hair, yawning again. “Cherry liked to talk about Cherry, period.”

“So I suppose you knew all about her boyfriends. Like Chip.”

“Chip.” Kristin tossed Chip aside with a wave of her hand. “He was just somebody she went to school with. Like I said, she didn’t have women friends, so he was somebody to talk to. Tell her troubles to, I s’pose.”

“Did she have a lot of troubles?”

“Well, men.” She gave an expressive gesture that seemed to say men were always trouble. “Milly said she told you about Mr. Perfect.”

“Your boss? She said he wanted to go out with Cherry but she wasn’t having any of it.”

Kristin snorted. “That’s all innocent little Milly knows. Cherry went out with him a couple of times. But she figured out he wasn’t going to give up his wife or his job for her, so she put a stop to it.”

It was a little different from the story Milly told, but it still didn’t reflect very favorably on either Cherry or her boss. “Anybody else she dated? Anyone she met at the restaurant, maybe?”

“Cherry didn’t go out with customers. At least, that’s what she said.” Kristin’s voice expressed doubt. “She did hint around about a guy-somebody she said was a cut above anybody else she’d dated. Kept saying as how he was crazy about her, and he was worth a lot of money, and she wouldn’t be waiting tables at that place forever.”